one quoted above, in which, upon the whole, plain words are used to convey pregnant and beautiful ideas and are set to a stately and moving music. We come nearer to the model of a serviceable prose, which can at will infuse beauty into the plainness of common speech, in the writings of the great preacher Jeremy Taylor. Born in 1613, and educated at Cambridge, the eloquent youth early attracted the notice of Laud. The reign of Charles I. produced in the English Church a singular number of persons who had the gift of devotional poetry; George Herbert, Quarles, Crashaw and Vaughan each wrote verse which still has many readers even among those who read little other poetry. But in Taylor's sermons, and above all in his two manuals of conduct and devotion, Holy Living and Holy Dying, the same inspiration found its fullest utterance. They were written, like most of his works, when the hand of the Commonwealth was heavy upon the Church. Yet in the first years after the death of the King-with whom Taylor had lived in close relations-a peaceful retreat was found for the preacher at Golden Grove, Lord Carbery's home in Wales. Here for a considerable period he enjoyed happy seclusion, before his writings drew trouble and even imprisonment on him-a stormy passage, not much amended after the Restoration by his promotion to the uneasy honour of the Irish Bishopric of Dromore. He died at Lisburn in County Down in 1667. Although exceeded in literary merit by the Holy Dying, there is little doubt that Taylor is best known to-day by his Rule and Exercises of Holy Living, published in 1650, which he himself defined as a treatise dealing with "the means and instruments of obtaining every virtue, and the remedies against every vice, and considerations serving to the resisting of all temptations, together with prayers containing the Whole Duty of a Christian." From it may be quoted first a passage on Contentedness, in which eloquence rises very near to poetry, and puts living virtue into the most ancient commonplace of exhortation : Consider how many excellent personages in all ages have suffered as great or greater calamities than this which now tempts thee to impatience. Almost all the ages of the world have noted that their most eminent scholars were most eminently poor, some by choice, but most by chance, and an inevitable decree of Providence; and in the whole sex of. women God hath decreed the sharpest pains of child-birth, to show that there is no state exempt from sorrow, and yet that the weakest persons have strength more than enough to bear the greatest evils; and the greatest queens, and the mothers of saints and apostles, have no charter of exemption from this sad sentence. But the Lord of men and angels was also the King of sufferings; and if thy coarse robe trouble thee, remember the swaddling-clothes of Jesus; if thy bed be uneasy, yet it is not worse than His manger; and it is no sadness to have a thin table, if thou callest to mind that the King of heaven and earth was fed with a little breast-milk and yet, besides this, He suffered all the sorrows which we deserved. We therefore have great reason to sit down upon our own hearths, and warm ourselves at our own fires, and feed upon content at home; for it were a strange pride to expect to be more gently treated by the Divine Providence than the best and wisest men, than apostles and saints, nay, the Son of the eternal God, the heir of both the worlds. : Yet there is a simpler and more touching beauty in this section from the chapter on Hope: : If your case be brought to the last extremity, and that you are at the pit's brink, even the very margin of the grave, yet then despair not; at least put it off a little longer and remember that whatsoever final accident takes away all hope from you, if you stay a little longer, and, in the meanwhile, bear it sweetly, it will also take away all despair too. For when you enter into the regions of death you rest from all your labours and your fears. That passage has something magical in the cadence of its words, a solemn harmony of utterance; and in the phrase "when you enter into the regions of death," there is felt the touch of imagination which gives at once body and definition to the vague idea of an existence ended and yet continued. One could easily quote passages even more beautiful from this great writer: but also sentences which defy grammar, and long periods that are clumsy and confused. And at the best Taylor's prose is fitted to the purpose of a preacher; it is a little too dignified, too stately, for common uses. The art of a prose which could dispense with the colours of poetry or the tone of the orator had yet to be introduced into English letters. CHAPTER VI. MILTON. THE study of a writer's life, if it be possible, is always advantageous for the full understanding of his work; in the case of Milton it is indispensable. Many men have deliberately chosen to be poets, but not as Milton did. Poetry was to him a sacred vocation, exacting an arduous discipline of the intelligence and character; and yet he felt himself impelled to relinquish wholly the making of verse during a period of twenty years in the plenitude of his powers. Paradise Lost, the work by which he is above all known, is the full and fit expression of a long life's gathered knowledge and experience; but in all the poetry that he ever wrote, the whole man, as he was at the time of writing, is implicit. For Milton had no dramatic gift to project himself into another's personality, no concern indeed with any personality or any thoughts but his own. Nor had he humour that should tempt him even to raise a doubt for a moment as to his real conviction. Thus, whereas Shakespeare shows us a whole world of men and women, good and bad, great and small, their thoughts and their feelings, Milton shows us the thoughts, the feelings, the beliefs, and the imaginings of one man. And therefore we only follow Milton's indication in trying to learn all that is to be known of John Milton, in order that we may know what his poetry meant to Milton when he wrote it. Milton's father was a prosperous and cultivated man of business living in Cheapside. His son, born in 1608 in London, was bred in London at St. Paul's School and under a tutor. The boy was precocious in study, "which," he says, "I seized with such eagerness that from the twelfth year of my age I scarce ever went to bed before midnight." His paraphrases of the Psalms date from his schooldays. At the age of sixteen he went to Christ's College, Cambridge, and there spent seven years. He had been destined for the Church, but early formed the opinion that "he who would take orders must subscribe slave." But the freedom which Milton craved was only of the mind; license was abhorrent to him, and his college nickname, the "lady of Christ's," had a reference not merely to his beauty. The Hymn on the Nativity, begun on Christmas morning in his twenty-first year (1629), marks at once the character of his beliefs and his imaginings. The subject of his first great poem is Christian; the poet already bids his Muse to "join her voice unto the angel-quire." He celebrates the coming of Christ, and pictures all the pageantry of heaven, "the helméd Cherubim and sworded Seraphim," and at the same time images the overthrow of the world's false gods, whom already he identified with the rebel angels. And yet even the verses that proclaim this ruin seem touched with a pity; one so steeped in classic literature could not be insensible to the beauty of paganism. The lonely mountains o'er, G |